Israeli lawmaker calls for genocide of Palestinians

An Israeli lawmaker who published a bloodthirsty call for the extermination of the Palestinian people on her Facebook wall has received nearly 5,000 "likes" for the genocidal screed.

Ayelet Shaked, a 38-year-old Knesset (parliament) member from the far-right, religious Habeyit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party, posted an unpublished article written by the late Uri Elitzur, leader of the Jewish settlement movement and a close advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The article asserted that "the entire Palestinian people is the enemy" and advocated genocide against the entire nation, "including its elderly women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure."

Elitzur claims that it is moral during wartime to slaughter innocent civilians:

"The morality of war... does not condemn... the US planes that destroyed the cities of Poland and wrecked half of Budapest, places whose wretched residents had never done a thing to America, but which had to be destroyed to win the war against evil... nor the NATO forces who bombed Milosevic's Belgrade, a city with a million civilians, elderly, babies, women and children... [nor] what America has done in Afghanistan, including the massive bombing of populated places, including the creation of a refugee stream of hundreds of thousands of people."

He continues:

"And in our war this is sevenfold more correct, because the enemy soldiers hide out among the population, and it is only through its support that they can fight. Behind every terrorist stands dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism... They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers... they should follow their sons [to hell], nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

Shaked posted Elitzur's shocking article a day before Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir was abducted and burned to death by suspected Jewish extremists in apparent revenge for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens by Hamas militants.

Electronic Intifada reports Shaked's post wasn't the only hateful one making the Israeli Internet rounds around the time of Khdeir's murder. The Orthodox Jewish-oriented website shtieble.net even called the slain teen a "little terrorist," although he was in fact an innocent child.

Hateful rhetoric is by no means the exclusive province of Israelis. Palestinian extremists have also said plenty of shocking and deplorable things about Israel. But Israel often claims to occupy the moral high ground, painting itself as a restrained, civilized democracy in which even Arab citizens enjoy equal rights, although in practice this is often not the case.

As noted earlier, Shaked's Facebook post has received nearly 5,000 "likes," as well as both supportive, but overwhelmingly critical, comments from around the world.